For the second time in six months Austrians will go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, and Norbert Hofer, head of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party which was founded by a former Nazi SS general, looks poised to win with polls showing him slightly ahead of the Green Party-backed candidate.
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Many see Sunday’s election as a key bellwether of the rising tide of far-right parties throughout Europe who are looking to gain power in upcoming elections in France, Netherlands, and Germany. If Hofer wins he would be arguably the first far-right candidate to take power since the formation of the European Union.
Sunday’s elections are a rerun of elections in May, where Alexander Van der Bellen, supported by the Green Party, narrowly defeated Hoffer. An election tribunal found irregularities with many ballots and called for a second election in December.
While Hofer – an avowed fan of Margaret Thatcher who is described by some as the “friendly face” of the far-right – disavows accusations that he is trying to court racist white-nationalist sentiments, many have expressed deep fears about his explicitly anti-immigrant and Islamaphobic rhetoric. In a video recording that went viral in Austria, a Holocaust survivor known only by her first name, Gertrude, said: “I’ve seen this once before, and (it) scares me." Deported to Auschwitz at age 16, Gertrude said, “It’s the humiliation of others, the demonization of others, that alarms me the most.”
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In May the Austrian interior ministry issued a report finding that xenophobic and racist crimes committed by far-right sympathizers have spiked by more than 50 percent in the past year with Muslims and Jews the primary targets.
Ironically, it’s Hofer’s campaign which was the first to break the taboo of making public reference to Austria's most infamous native son, Adolf Hitler. In a Facebook post created by Freedom Party operatives, Hoffer juxtaposed images of his rival Van der Bullen walking in the Austrian alps with similar ones of the former Nazi leader.
Hofer is one of several far-right European leaders who has explicitly referred to the election of Donald Trump – who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Clan and other white nationalist organizations – as a promising sign for their own brand of racist anti-establishment populism.
During his recent trial on hate crime charges, the vicious Islamophobe Geert Wilders, who plans on running in the upcoming Presidential elections in the Netherlands, said that Trump’s victory signals a political revolution which is “making short shrift of the politically-correct doctrines of the elite and their subordinate media.” He added, “It’s about to be proven in Austria.”
While Austria is one of Europe’s wealthiest countries with a relatively intact social-welfare system, Hofer has been able to take advantage of a growing unemployment rate, anxieties about globalization, anti-elite and anti-EU sentiment, as well as Islamaphobic media hysteria about the refugee “crisis” in Europe.
During the campaign, Hofer echoed Trump’s campaign rhetoric, saying he wanted to “take our country back” from an "uncontrolled influx of migrants alien to our culture who seep into our social welfare system," adding that "civil war in the medium-term (is) not unlikely".
While Austria’s presidency is a largely ceremonial post, many analysts think a Hofer victory would trigger parliamentary elections and signal the end of the broadly pro-EU political coalition which has governed the nation for years.
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